An archive of my first 5 years of living in Mexico by Ed Fladung

What is Hammock Dreams?

Hi, my name is Ed. In my life I've lived in Philly, New York, Wisconsin, Berkeley and Los Angeles. That was then. Now I live in coastal Nayarit Mexico. I've been living here for 6 years now (!). In these pages I write about and photograph my daily experience which includes a lot of surfing and mexican beach town street life. I also post about things I find interesting: art, design, photography, music, tech, etc...

YouTube – Gerry Lopez Shaping Demovideo of Gerry Lopez in the shaping booth from Sacred Craft Surf Expo 09. amazing! I really wish he took the time to explain, more, exactly what he was doing. and I could do without the music, this is school here folks. pay attention.

Dan Baum: The Following Account of My Short Career at The New Yorker Ran as a Series of TweetsThe Following Account of My Short Career at The New Yorker Ran as a Series of Tweets on May 8, 11, and 12, 2009* "People often ask why I left the New Yorker. After all, I had a staff writer job. Isn’t that the best job in journalism? Yes. Nobody leaves a New Yorker job voluntarily. I was fired. And over the next few days, I’ll tell that story here, in 140 " – great story told in 140 chunks.

Copyright Critics Rationalize Theft – WSJ.comutterly retarded article on how writers, composers, designers and other content creators whose work is easily copied/duplicated need to fight back with copyright against the faceless masses of copyright breakers. Let's get this straight people: COPYRIGHT IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. Copyright is the domain of crumbling, antiquated civilizations. end of story.

007: Daniel Craig | Icon_ologysome behind the scenes photos of Daniel Craig on the 007 film sets. amazing. dude is classy. definitely Steve McQueen bad-ass style. I think He's easily the best Bond since Connery, maybe better than the original.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky"The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several."

TPM Photo Features | Talking Points Memo | Just Say No Yes to Earmarks"When the 2009 spending bill passed last week, Republicans on the Hill– and the stray Dem — were united in a chorus of earmark-bashing. In the words of Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY): "Cut 'em all out." But it turns out that while the senator from Kentucky voted against the bill, he had $10.6 million in earmarks — 13 separate earmarks, to be exact — in the bill. And he is by no means alone. Several members touted their opposition to the bill and then voted against it, even as they tucked in earmarks for their own districts (thanks to Taxpayers for Common Sense). Oh the shame." – I guess it's useless to question why we're getting stuff like this from TPM and not CNN or NBC?

Me:
So this Facebook meme1 is floating around and I got tagged recently. I’m sure you’ve seen the same one, from one of your friends. You never clicked through to the posted image to see what it was all about and worse â€“ you’re getting tons of messages from random people you don’t know, who are commenting on it. But you should really check it out, if you’ve been tagged. I don’t usually do memes, but this one is pretty bad-ass. The gist of it, is to take a photo, a random title, and a snippet of a random quote and jam it all together to create an album cover.

You:
zzzz…z….z.zzz…zz

Me:
I’ve been watching this meme rev up and there some really nice concoctions brewing all over Facebook. It’s actually a secret plot to publicize creative commons. Chances are, you’ve been tagged by one or two already. Well, this is mine. Hit me up on facebook, if you wanna get tagged.

You:
Are you done yet?

Me:
It turns out that if you take the time to check, 99.9% of all the images on flickr’s interestingness are copyrighted works. That means no remixing, no alteration, no nothing of that person’s content. So taking their image, messing with it a small bit and adding some type over it â€“ essentially creating something wholly new â€“ is against the copyright and apparently, illegal.

My photos are copyrighted as well, though I don’t see how someone on facebook remixing my imagery could possibly violate my rights as the copyright holder, but some people might get pissed at this. The thing about memes is that they reach a tipping point and start to spread like wild fire. This one seems to have legs. I’m definitely interested to hear what happens when photographers start to notice their photos up on facebook and other people’s blogs. I don’t see any groups on flickr or facebook to discuss this yet.

You:
zzzz…z….z.zzz…zz

btw – check out that search: fellow surf blogger homie Three Tree Journal is #6 on that list. ↩

The Year in Pictures: The Fairey Tale Continues …a really nice summary of the whole fracas caused by the Shepard Fairey "HOPE" poster and the quest to identify the original photographer, for purposes of acknowledgment. James Danzinger started the quest, which has had several abrupt turns, the most sinister of which AP claiming sole copyright over the image and trying to go after Fairey litigiously. In the end this story is about identifying the photographer (Mannie Garcia) and giving him due credit for creating the photograph behind one of the most iconic images of our generation. and Danzinger sums it all up eloquently.

FireScope – HTML Brains at your Fingertips"FireScope is a Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug, to extend it with reference material for HTML and CSS. The extension's core functionality is centered around a new Reference panel, which contains a search tool for looking up HTML elements, attributes, and CSS properties." – awesome!

PLYWERK | HOMEamazing upload and print service for mounting your photos to maple or bamboo backings. beautiful products. slightly on the expensive side.

Big Cartelreally nice minimal shopping cart service. i don;t understand though how they make money if they don't take percentages.

The Black Lips Get Kicked Out Of India | series on VBS.TVshort story: The Black Lips are scheduled to play 6 dates in India's version of American Idol. At the first show in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, the bass player moons the crowd and then plays his bass with his dick. They do other stupid stuff, oblivious ignorant of Indian cultural customs. The show ends with bottles being thrown at the band and the tour organizers pressing charges and the police trying to arrest them. They flee. A ton of stuff happens. They barely escape India and Indian jails. – Definitely a rough, scary experience for the band and a witch hunt lead by utlra-conservative nut jobs whose brutality is legendary, but despite what Vice Records says this has nothing to do with 'artistic freedom', it's about a group of people going to a foreign land, who's ignorance of cultural customs almost lands them in jail. It's obvious from the video that they had no idea what they were doing and no one had given them a list of dos and donts. Luckily the story has a happy ending.